Evolve - Practical Response

The Shepherd comes!

I have started the design process of the Shepherd by detailing out his 4 unique abilities that should help give form to the creature in my head. It should be kept in mind however that I am not a game designer and will not have the opportunity to test such abilities to see their effectiveness etc. but all the same, the aim is for an interesting design:

Call of the Wild: The Shepherd can summon wildlife in to aid him in his fight, with stage 1 giving access to small creatures, stage 2 moving to large wildlife and stage 3 unleashing another monster (which would be stage 1). These creatures/monsters would follow the Shepherd until in a fight, where they will stay till either they or the hunters are dead.
Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: The Shepherd can disguise itself as a type of large wildlife for a limited time period. Each stage would lengthen the time in which the monster could disguise itself.
Shepherd's Crook: The Shepherd can use it's large hooked claws to pick up hunters and throw them a great distance, damaging them in the process. Each stage increases the range and damage of this attack.
Carrion Swarm: The Shepherd has a swarm of Carrion Birds flying around it's form, protecting it from incoming damage and acting as it's armour; it can send a flock of these Carrion Birds to attack the hunters, damaging them and obscuring their view, whilst draining some of it's own armour. Each stage increases the range and damage of the attack as well as reducing the armour depletion rate.  

Using the technique of silhouettes to try to flesh out as many ideas as possible and be able to quickly scrap things that aren't working, I have started the practical work on the monster. I have this sort of image in my head of a hunch-backed creature that stalks slowly and can glide from high places to get from a to b faster. I would like to try to include some sort of hood on my monster, as well as reflecting the Carrion Birds that protect the Shepherd in it's design.

Here at first I was just aiming for a variety of designs to leave my options open. You can see the Carrion Birds flying about the monster designs, but I feel that this makes for a rather clustered page and detracts from the important part; the monster designs.

I began to refine some of my preferred designs, changing some quite radically. Still got those birds going on though.

Further refining of the designs started to show 2 clear designs: low and hunched; tall and spindly. I still haven't quite settled on a design for the Shepherd's Crook claws.

The last of the silhouettes where I have focused down the preferred route of the low and hunched creature due to it suiting the monster's abilities better. I think it's time to start sketching now as the designs are getting very close to where I want them to be and I would just be floundering around if I kept going.

From these silhouettes, I decided that I would need to get decent images of the Carrion Birds from 'Evolve' as reference before I could start to sketch out ideas, as I knew they would play a role in the design of the creature. This became a rather major stumbling block however, as I could find no images of these 'Birds' anywhere! I therefor took to Youtube and watched various videos of players running around as the monster to hope to get some screenshots from that. This, in itself, was a challenge also, as the 'Birds' are only on-screen for a few seconds at the most and the models/textures for them are incredibly low resolution, meaning I ended up with no better than an outline shape to work from and a bit of patterning on the skin. Here are the fruits of my labours:

 

 As you can clearly see, these 'Birds' closer resemble bats with bladed heads and long forked tails. This threw me somewhat, as my plan during the silhouette stage of designing the monster was to make feathers a recurring theme. This would of course need to be changed, so I have sketched out my interpretation of the 'Carrion Birds' from the images I captured so that I can take pointers from their design into the Shepherd.

I'm rather pleased with how the plan view image of the 'Carrion Bird' came out, as it gives me distinct shapes and motifs with which to work. The one thing I wasn't too clear on was the head blades, as in my reference photos, the blades are to the side in the first image, but pointing forwards in the later ones; I figure I can just use my creative licence with this sort of thing at any rate.

And so without further ado, I could move on to doing the sketches of the Shepherd monster, based off of my silhouettes and the 'Carrion Birds'.

As you can see, I have given each rendition of the Shepherd an animal-based title as each of the existing monster designs for 'Evolve' are influenced by animal anatomy; in this way, I feel like I can be closer in-keeping with the other designs and allow for my monster to fit in with them. Whilst drawing, at first I did find I was somewhat struggling to make Shepherd look the part, but as the designs went on, I found that they were getting not only closer to the other 'Evolve' monsters, but also to what I wanted the Shepherd to look like. So far, the Bat Shepherd is my favourite, though I am slightly worried he looks too much like the Wraith 'Evolve' monster. I do really like other parts on the monsters and I like the Crocodile design in particular, but still feel that Bat is the best basis for my design. From now I can take the designs I have and create a more final version from which I can then proceed to iterate. I might actually take a second design forward just to see where it goes.

I decided to create some sketchier sketches to quickly churn out some ideas for the Shepherd. The head is proving somewhat difficult to realise, with my designs looking far more 'Pacific Rim' than 'Evolve'.

I then decided that this project has dragged on far too long and I realise that I am now losing interest, so it's best to save it whilst I have the relevant materials. So I have therefor created a more final version of the Shepherd, based on the crocodile design in particular. I also added the Carrion Birds around it to give an idea of scale. I like the idea that every time the Shepherd disguises itself, it sheds it's skin and the Carrion Birds surrounding it swoop down and eat it; so their defending the Shepherd is payed off by a free meal. I imagine the Shepherd would have, like the other Evolve monsters, dark skin, but when it sheds it's fresh skin is very pale for a short time.

Now that's an under-bite!

I'm really pleased with a lot of this design, but the head is still not right, so I have therefor focused my efforts on designing a head that I feel fits in with what I am aiming for. The main problem is getting the design to fit in with the other existing 'Evolve' monsters. It's hard not to design conventional monsters and go down a more alien route, especially when it's difficult to spot patterns in the existing Evolve monsters' designs.

Playing about with the under-bite, seeing what can be done with it.

Focusing on the 'hood' aspect I want the Shepherd to have; somewhat reminiscent of the Alien Queen from Aliens.

Getting there, but haven't nailed the 'hood' design yet.

The problem I was having was the design looking too much like the Wraith, but with the 'drapes' of the 'hood', this design looks very different, whilst still fitting in.

Taking the very last head design and adding the bladed horns/mandibles of the top design on the same page, I used photoshop to splice it onto the body of the original final design. I then took this rough version and, using layout paper, created a clean version that would be suitable for working colours into.

Final design - rough

Final design - clean

 With a clean version, I could then print out these onto paper taken from my Copic Marker pad, as I believed it would be best suited for the job at hand, seen as the pad was indeed designed for the exact markers I have. The results were, however, less than satisfactory: the colours came out blotchy; blending colours was a near impossibility when the next colour you would put on would take away the one beneath it (best way I could describe it is to imagine a palette knife scraping paint off a tile).

I have just uploaded these images without any Photoshop enhancement or clean-up so you can see the problems I was describing as I see them. Fortunately, I have used my Copic markers on other paper and though it leaks through unlike on the Marker Pad, I don't have any of the quality problems i was having. I even looked up reviews on the pad afterwards to find other people had had the same problem, and yet some people seem to love it. Go figure!